New York Features for Store Developers

[Pradeep Sharma]

When New York release is around the corner, it’s that time of year again for us to learn about the new features, enhancements, and APIs that may be applicable to someone developing an application to list on the store or OEM. I'm very excited and want to share with you about the followings.

Last week we opened up Early Access for Technology Partners to get their hands on New York, running it through its paces and preparing to submit their apps for certification

In this post, we'll provide an overview of all the significant features and improvements that Technology Partners will want to be aware of, whether you are building apps for the ServiceNow Store or OEM. The TPP technical team is also working on doing deep dives into many of these areas, so stay tuned.

New Features and Major Enhancements

Natural Language Understanding
Provides an NLU model builder and an NLU inference service that you can use to enable the system to learn and respond to human-expressed intent. By entering natural language examples into the system, you help it understand word meanings and contexts so it can infer user or system actions. For example, Virtual Agent administrators can configure a Virtual Agent Designer conversation flow to consume NLU models so that agent chatbots can better understand user statements in the conversation

Dynamic Translation
For a seamless localization experience, you can use translation service providers and enable the translation of a dynamically generated text, such as user-entered text on various forms

Instance Data Replication
Instance Data Replication copies data updates made on one instance, called the producer, to one or more other instances, called consumers. Data from a producer instance can be replicated into tables of the same name on consumer instances or into entirely different tables. The data can be replicated as is or you can modify the data during replication. IDR does not replicate metadata or many user tables, so do not use it to clone instances.

ServiceNow Mobile
The mobile platform is updated to use the new mobile hierarchy, which includes new features such as application launchers and a configurable navigation bar. ServiceNow Mobile is built from the ground up to make building apps that are mobile ready faster. If you have an existing mobile capability or think your app will benefit from one then you should look at how ServiceNow Mobile could accelerate your rollout.

Automated Testing Framework
The ATF received a lot of attention in the New York release with enhancements like

• Test an attachment-dependent business rule by uploading an attachment either from a form or from a server-side API call
• Reduce testing time by running multiple tests and test suites in parallel
• Prevent conflicting tests from running in parallel by marking them as mutually exclusive
• .... and much more!

If you haven't yet included ATF tests in your application you should strongly consider it as it will assist your customers in testing your app through their upgrade cycles. It should also form a part of your internal app testing.

Flow Designer / Integration Hub
Flow Designer continues to grow in capability and Madrid sees many new capabilities including:

• Inbound Email trigger
• Domain separation support 
• Run flow in the foreground
• New Actions
• FlowAPI quick methods

IntegrationHub too has added capabilities with the addition of:

• Data stream actions and pagination
• JDBC step
• Retry policies
• SSH step
• XML parser step
• OpenAPI support

Authentication
With respect to authentication, API for JSON Web Token generation, Add role-based capability to multi-factor authentication (MFA) and client credential options for outbound OAuth has been added in the New York release.

Guided Tour Designer
Support has been added to create Guided Tours for Custom UI pages and new API’s

Service Portal
Too many to name them all, but Antivirus Scanning support for Service Portal attachments and Open a Service Portal page in the ATF are a few of the enhancements. 

Scripting and App Dev Enhancements

• New Scoped APIs - DecisionTableAPI, DynamicTranslation, TransformerDefinition are a few of the new scoped APIs and methods included in the platform.
• Remote Tables  - Connect the Now Platform to third-party sources, or to another instance, so that you can retrieve external data and optionally cache it in the memory. You can view external data in lists or forms and process it with standard Glide scripts.
• Context Menu - Context menu is an exciting new platform capability that allows users to navigate to Script include definitions, Glide API documentation, and custom table definition and data.
• Application administration - You can set a property to require that more than one user must have the application-specific admin role for a scoped application. Assigning the application-specific admin role to multiple users reduces the risk of getting locked out of the scoped application.
• Delegated development and deployment - Delegate non-administrators to use update sets to deploy applications to other instances.
• Guided Application Creator - Guided Application Creator is the new way to set up applications on the Now Platform. You can set up an application and use it right away. A developer can add more functions later.
• Reporting - An admin can configure Agent Workspace to use Performance Analytics and Reporting widgets and reports, enabling agents to see the score and trend data visualizations of their cases and incidents.
• Cloning - Cloning now supports to schedule automatic cloning’s, which is the easiest way to keep your cloned instances up to date. Also, you can now view the status of a cloning session in real time. For example, when a session is taking a long time.

Other

• Platform security release notes
• Session Log
• Changes to plugins in the New York release

Release Notes by Product

I've covered Platform and Application Development release notes in this article, but if your app has a dependency or adjacency to a ServiceNow product, you should read through that product's New York release notes. I've listed those here by product:

• IT Business Management release notes
• Customer Service Management release notes
• Governance, Risk, and Compliance release notes
• HR Service Delivery release notes
• IT Operations Management release notes
• IT Service Management release notes
• Performance Analytics and Reporting release notes
• Security Operations release notes
• Software Asset Management release notes

Feel free to bookmark this post, and if you think I've missed something, please let me know so I can get it added.

Good luck and happy developing!